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Over Optimization?

Yet another basic question....is it bad to try and optimize a page for numerous keywords that are all related? My site is an eCommerce site. So for and example: I am trying to optimize my homepage (www.shopconfections.com) for about 20 keywords that all directly describe my site.

On product pages I am optimizing for about 15 keywords that all directly relate to my product.

Many of my keywords are long tailed. Can there be too many? What are the consequences of that?

9 Responses

A more practical approach would be to optimize individual landing pages for specific keywords. If it sounds like more work, it likely will be, but done properly you'll increase the user experience, Google will favor it, still be able to achieve desired organic listings, and hopefully see an improved ROI with regard to your SEO efforts.

Can you give a specific example of a product that needs 15 keywords? It might help to examine this a bit more closely.

3. Narrow optimization to the most relevent keywords by user intent, traffic volume and cost/benefit.

4. Understand principle of keyword cannabilization.

5. Understand principle of duplicate content.

6. Title tags are limited to 60-70 characters. Its a challenge for all of us to use that space as wisely as possible in conjunction with our on-page optimization. You've only got space in the title tag to optimize for 1-2 maybe three keywords depending on how long the phrase.

7. Typically, organic search results for an ecommerce site will land on category and product pages.

I was mulling over all that you suggested and I am curious about a few things...

1. so obviously I need to cull my keywords down...but how do you deal with all the iterations of keywords that someone might use to search for. For example one of my main keywords is monogrammed preppy gifts. So if I use that keyword and skip preppy monogrammed gifts then what about those who search preppy monogrammed gifts? Does that question make sense?

2. I used Google AdWords to search and get variations of the keywords. The decision was made to go for the lower competition words because I thought I would be more successful with that tactic. So if I cull my keywords do I stay with the lower competition words which of course have less searches?

I did a quick comparison look at both variations of keywords. The broadmatch of the terms is the same at 1,000 local searches a month each with a cpc average of .84 and .85 respectively. This data is not very helpful in that the broadmatch results suggests Google is seeing the phrase similarly (semantically) and does not help you make a wise decision.

Finally, the exact match results for Preppy Monogrammed Gifts come back with 720 results a month with an average .92 a click. Exact match for Monogrammed Preppy Gifts returns only 12 results a month at .54 a click.

You could also put this information in the AdWords traffic estimator for more cost/benefit analysis but for the sake of time we'll go with results from Keywords.

I would interpret this data and optimize for the Preppy Monogrammed Gifts as it has a sizable (but more competitive) reach. The competition drops off so much for monogrammed preppy gifts, you have to ask if it is worth the time and effort considering your ROI could be so low because of the low volume. Once you optimize for Preppy Monogrammed Gifts you will probably rank well for the alternate phrase anyway because they are so close semantically and Google recognizes that.

Finally, when looking at Keyword results, I make decisions based on "phrase" and [exact match] with exact match having the most influence driving my decisions.

I'll add one more thing that I forgot to mention. How low do you go on competitive keywords? It's a rather arbitrary number, but I've heard it recommended that you should look for longer tail phrases that return a minimum of 500 searches a month and maximum of 10,000. If you have a lot of products that don't generate more than 500 exact phrase searches a month, you can only go with the best returns available.

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